Re: Announcement: The "info" URI Scheme

On 2 Oct 2003 at 13:55, Sandro Hawke wrote:

 > So it seems easier to you to get the info: scheme approved and
 > deployed than to deploy a web server?  If people were instead
 > encouraged to use
 >
 >    http://niso.org/2003/isbn/0-13-103805-2
 >
 > then NISO could provide whatever information it thought was helpful to
 > people who ended up doing an HTTP GET on it.   If it wanted to
 > mainting a proper ISBN database, it could provide information about
 > the book at that address; otherwise it could just point to some ISBN
 > resources and let people figure it out themselves.

But if, instead, a non-HTTP URI is used as the "canonical" means of
referring to books by ISBN (as, in fact, the "urn:isbn" namespace has
actually been registered and has an RFC defining it, as I recall),
then the end user has more flexibility in deciding what information
he/she wishes to retrieve on it.  When typed into a browser or
followed as a hyperlink, a "http" URI will always cause the resource
set up by the "owner" of that URI to be retrieved (or failed to be
retrieved in the case of 404 or DNS errors), while another scheme is
capable of user-driven configurability with regard to how to treat an
attempt to dereference it (or would be if browsers were sufficiently
advanced to give this capability, as I'd hope they'd be if such URIs
were in wide use).  I'd be able to set my browser to go to a page
related to that ISBN at niso.org, or amazon.com, or some other site
of my own choosing, or make a database query, or bring up a local
file from my own system, or whatever else I chose.

--
Dan
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

Received on Thursday, 2 October 2003 17:28:28 UTC